Headlines

Gene Healy

“No labels”? No, thanks

No Labels, the ostensibly post-partisan group founded in 2010 to promote “a new politics of problem solving,” launched a press offensive this week. The group’s newly minted national leaders, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, penned a Washington Post op-ed Monday and appeared on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. …

In part, it’s the self-congratulatory, schoolmarmish earnestness surrounding the campaign. No Labels actually gives out a label: the “Problem Solvers Seal” for candidates who have committed “to join a group of Problem Solvers.” It’s as cloying as a “Mean People Suck” bumper sticker and promises to be just as effective.

No Labels demands that “at all joint meetings or sessions of Congress, each member should be seated next to at least one member of the other party.” They pushed this idea before last year’s State of the Union and got more than 200 members to look for a cross-aisle BFF to sit with. If that led to an outpouring of legislative comity in 2012, I missed it.

If you don’t choose a label, society will make one for you. That’s how we make sense of the world. The founders denounced “factions,” but we ended up with them anyway. Something about our political system favors two parties, while parliamentary systems where the executive is determined by power in the legislature where fragmentation is easier to pull off, and coalitions form easier.